Harjot Kaur made a soundtrack for Vincent Van Gogh’s Painting - Starry Night. She said this was the first painting she had seen and was mesmerised by it. She researched about the history of the artist. Van Gogh had gone through a lot of mental turmoil, like chaos in his mind, but would try to find some peace while looking at the night sky and paint it on his canvas. Harjot also intitated the discussion of how peace and chaos co-exist with each other and one cannot exist without the other.
This understanding was expressed in the soundtrack she’s made where sounds of chaos and peace were intertwined with eachother, overlaying each other, which I felt, denotes the everyday state of not just Van Gogh’s mind, but everyone. But what stuck to me was the shocking fact of Van Gogh cutting his ear. That must have been extremely painful and it was a consequence of a heated arguement between him and another artist.
She also incorporated "repetiton" of sounds of peace and chaos, expressing that we all go through it all the time. I tried to show that aspect using the colourful background in the beginning and the end (the background represents peace, and used lots of colours for Van Gogh's painting was colourful).
Harjot put the sound of heartbeat in the beginning and the end of the track to denote repetiton of the cycle of being in chaos and in peace. I animated for the first 18 seconds of the soundtrack. An artist is known for what he/she puts out to the public that rises from the heart and the heart is the witness of the internal turmoils we all go through in life. This aspect of heart witnessing is depicted in the form of an eye. The eye of Van Gogh's heart has witnessed his mental issues and arguements, to reflecting the chaos and peace, witnessing the night skies and of course, painting. I had never made an animation that had an intense storyline like this, so it was be fun to work with it, and make animation accordingly.